Permanent Address

Not Dhananjay Koul. His eyes begin to shine, and he starts to shout. ‘‘It’s my bus, it’s my bus,’’ he yells with unalloyed delight. ‘‘It goes to Ashma and I used to be on it every day.’’ Homecomings are like that. Dim memories become stimulants, the coherent turn to happy babbling.

We are on the road home with Koul, a well-known Kashmiri classical singer. About 15 km ahead is the tiny township of Safapora. On the banks of Mansbal lake, in the corner of a sprawling apple orchard is a 200-year-old, three-storey, mud-and-brick house. This is—was—Koul’s home.

One sad night in 1990—when his beautiful valley was roiled by violence—Koul picked up his harmonium and left, hoping to return in a few months. ‘‘It seems as if it happened yesterday. I had promised everybody I would be back just as soon as things got a bit normal,’’ he says. ‘‘But 14 years have passed.’’

So today Koul, 32, is back, carrying his favourite harmonium—and a tanpura he mastered while living in the distant, baking plains of Delhi. Uninvited, he is returning because he yearns to see his home again. He wants to walk the streets. Meet neighbours. And childhood friends. And maybe take a boat to the lotus garden, deep in the centre of the Mansbal lake. And sing.

‘‘Is it safe?’’ he asks again. ‘‘Absolutely,’’ I assure him as the fear chokes me. I don’t know Safapora well, but I do know this: When 70,000 have died in 14 years, there is always a risk. One grenade attack, I think, and everything will be a mess. So silently I pray that nothing goes wrong today.

Thankfully, Koul isn’t looking at the worry lines on my face. He’s looking for childhood memories in every little detail of the road, the trees and the little hamlets that dot the paddy fields. The words tumble out.

‘‘How much longer?”
“It seems the road has stretched.”
“I wish we could fly.”

We see a group of children playing in the courtyard of their school. Another set of memories comes tumbling out. ‘‘This is a new school. I will show you my school. It is beautiful. It is right next to the lake.’’

He stops—and without really expecting an answer—asks: ‘‘But is it still there?’’ No one responds. Koul starts humming, momentarily lifting the tension in the Sumo. It’s one of his favourite Kashmiri songs.

‘‘Bhe gevani az, gulan ta sumbalan ta masvalan honduy khumaara hot, ta maara mot, mudur modur ta nyendri hot su nagmi kah, bu gyavana az su nagma kaanh.’’

I will not sing today…
Of roses and bulbuls,
Of irises and hyacinths…
The dust clouds of war have robbed the iris of her hue, The bulbul lies silenced by the thunderous roar of guns…
Hill and mountain lie crouched in fear.

Koul falls silent and the mood inside the Sumo turns sombre again. After a brief pause, the driver—silent until then—speaks of Kashmir’s great hope. ‘‘A day will come when everything will be fine again,’’ he says comfortingly. A group of Kashmiri Muslims, I think, are taking a Hindu back to his ancestral home. All of us know this migration was not voluntary. But who is responsible?

Not one among us ventures into this minefield. Theoretically, Koul is in enemy territory and we constitute the perpetrators of his personal misery even if we are friends. The truth, as always, is far more complicated and often different from the popular notions outside Koul’s shimmering valley.

When we clank across the Sumbhal bridge, Koul’s flood returns. ‘‘Oh! My God. Everything is still the same. Look, across the river. It is Nund Kishore’s shrine. I used to go there often with my grandmother. There is the famous shrine of Roop Bhawani close by in Waskun village.’’

As the Sumo crosses a little iron bridge apparently laid by the army, Koul wants to tell us a story.

‘‘Please stop,’’ he requests. The Sumo pulls over. He points to a house and takes us back to 1974. A local Congress leader, Mohammad Sultan Kaloo, lived in the house. He bought a black-and-white TV, the first in the area. Every evening, the whole of Safapora would come to Kaloo’s house to watch this new magic.

Koul always went to the great show with his father. There was such a scrum that Kaloo sahib began to put the TV on his window sill and place a big mirror in front so that the crowds in the courtyard could watch.

‘‘I was always baffled,’’ says Koul, ‘‘why everybody in those films was a lefty.”

We move on. Past the final turn for Safapora, we get the first glimpse of Mansbal lake. Koul is dumbstruck. He looks around silently, eyes moist. No one says anything. No one disturbs him.

There are many speed breakers as we approach a Rashtriya Rifles camp—one of the biggest in the area. ‘‘This used to be an agricultural farm,’’ Koul says quietly, looking at the soldiers and the barbed wire fence protecting the entrance.

As we arrive at Safapora chowk, Koul asks the driver to turn left. ‘‘My home is just a block away,’’ he says. We pass through a narrow lane, and he asks us to stop near a paramilitary encampment.

Suddenly, a soldier whistles. ‘‘You can’t stop near the camp,’’ he shouts. We move ahead. And as we walk back to the entrance behind Koul, we see the soldier, finger on trigger.

Koul stops, his eyes fixed on the gate, waiting for the soldier. A woman with a child in her lap comes out from the neighbouring house. She looks at him with a frown, then begins running towards him. A group of men come out of the shops. After all these years—they have not forgotten.

‘‘Dhananjay, Dhananjay,’’ they shout, mobbing him, hugging him. The soldier doesn’t know what to do. A few more Central Reserve Police Force soldiers have rushed to the gate, as if ready to prevent an attack.

‘‘Can you please let me go in?’’ he asks the soldier with quiet excitement. ‘‘This is my home.’’ Then, as if proferring a passport, he declares: ‘‘My name is Dhananjay Koul.’’

The bemused soldier asks us to wait. We sit on a parapet, and after five minutes an officer appears at the door. He asks Koul his name. ‘‘I am not a fidayeen,’’ he intones. ‘‘This is my home.’’

Before the officer can respond, the neighbours come to Koul’s rescue. A policeman, too, has recognised him. The soldiers open the door, push the barbed wire to a side and let us in, one by one.

The house is still in good shape. As we sit quietly in the compound, Dhananjay points to the annexe in front. ‘‘This is where my father used to run his theatre. He had a group here,’’ he explains, the voice now even, his mind a whirl.

Inside the house, soldiers are asleep on beds in the two front rooms. Koul is especially keen to show us one room. ‘‘We all miss it,’’ he muses, walking up the stairs. ‘‘This thokur room—an exclusive temple in every Pandit house—is always above the entrance. My grandmother prayed here for 50 years. She died in Jammu, craving to return home.’’

We are now in his parents’ room. There are paintings on the walls, all done by hand, all more than a century old. It’s when we reach the little room next to the puja area that his emotional dam comes apart. The tears start to flow down Koul’s cheeks. ‘‘This,’’ he says, ‘‘is where Sanju bhaiya and I lived.’’

An old man with a grey beard suddenly pushes through us to reach Koul. Abdul Gani Sheikh worked for the Kouls for over 50 years. The emotions are like a river in flood, powerful, overwhelming. Outside the window, the entire village is gathered around the fence protecting the CRPF camp.

As we come out of the house, Koul is inconsolable. Then we lose him among his neighbours—childhood friends, his father’s friends and even his mother’s friends. ‘‘We were not just neighbours. We were like a family,’’ says Mohammad Siddique, who had played cricket with the Koul brothers.

‘‘There are at least a dozen men from the village who got jobs because of Shantiji (Dhananjay’s father),’’ Abdul Gani Sheikh chips in.

Is this a sad or happy reunion? I can’t really decide. It is getting late, but I am reluctant to tell Koul it is time to leave. We wait till he is ready, then walk towards the front gate again. There are dozens of women waiting on the road. The CRPF soldiers have not let them in. It takes almost 20 minutes to talk to them. As we finally climb into the Sumo, Koul asks the driver to hurry up. ‘‘I don’t want to look back,’’ he says firmly. ‘‘Please take me to the lake.’’

We stop at the banks of the Mansbal. The sun is about to set and we hop into two shikaras. We can see the lotus garden—in full bloom—shining in the twilight. It is calm, beautiful.

Koul is carrying his tanpura as he sits alone in a shikara.

As the sun sinks uncertainly over Kashmir, Koul begins to sing again. ‘‘Maremaday madan waro, Kar sa meoun neyaye andhay…” Oh my beautiful beloved, when will my tragedy end…

We return to the banks, climb into the Sumo and leave. Everyone is quiet. It is dark, and the road is deserted.